


on holding, and being held

by malevon



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, The Buried - Freeform, martin is a weighted blanket and sometimes that's bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 20:55:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30010827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malevon/pseuds/malevon
Summary: jon has a nightmare about his time in the coffin. martin tries to help.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 8
Kudos: 115





	on holding, and being held

“Mmph—Jon?”

Martin wakes up to Jon’s hyperventilating, and there’s a pang in his chest, sharp and present, because this isn’t the first time this has happened. It never gets easier, and it never hurts him any less, seeing Jon get like this. Not now. Not anymore. Not when it’s supposed to be _over._

Groggy, Martin lifts his arm from around Jon’s waist and props himself up until he’s sitting, and then he leans forward, putting himself in Jon’s line of sight, the routine. If Martin doesn’t do this—

Well. Jon’s told him enough about the things he sees sometimes when he wakes up. They’re not pleasant.

So instead, Martin puts his hands on either side of Jon’s face, thumbing at his temples, pushing back sweat-slicked strands. His breathing hasn’t settled yet, which makes another sharp finger of fear jab at Martin’s gut, but he forces himself to ignore it. _Stop thinking about the worst case scenario all the time._

“Jon, love? Wake up, please.”

And Jon wakes up.

His eyes shoot open as if he’d been slapped, as if he’d been shocked. Even in the dark, Martin can see the whites of his eyes, his beautiful brown pupils darting around as if, as if, as if—

“Jon, Jon, heart, it’s me. Just me. It’s me.”

The rapid inhale-and-exhale beneath him only gets _worse_ and only now Martin is allowing himself to think of the worst case scenario. His breathing shakes the entirety of his small frame, and Martin moves his hands to Jon’s shoulders, trying to keep him from coiling in on himself like a spring ready to compress itself into nonexistence. 

Jon’s hands, trembling as they are, come up to meet Martin’s shoulders, and Martin thinks that he’s starting to come around, even as his breathing stays the same. If he can just be aware of what’s happening, if he can give _any_ indication that he knows he’s panicking, Martin can work with that. But for now, there’s nothing, save for the faint pressure Martin feels, weak, trembling, the shaking hands of his partner thrumming in time with his breathing, much, much too fast.

For a few seconds, it’s just the two of them, Martin trying to keep Jon grounded in the present with as much contact as he can manage, wrapping Jon in his presence. This usually works. This _usually_ works, Martin tells himself, it’s just a matter of time before Jon will come back to himself, before he will return Martin’s embrace and Martin will help him come back to himself, and they’ll fall asleep wrapped in each other’s arms just like they always do when one of them wakes up with a nightmare. 

Against the crook of his neck, Martin can feel the rushes of air from Jon beginning to — not slow, perhaps, but he’s saying something, and Martin feels a rush of relief. He pulls back from Jon, looking down at him and expecting to see clarity in his eyes, expects to see the terror at least partially faded —

Only to see it has grown exponentially, and words are spilling out from his lips, pale even in the darkness surrounding them.

“ _Stop stop stop stop stop let me — ”_

What?

Martin pulls back further, giving him a little room to breathe, giving _himself_ room to breathe and comprehend what’s going on, and it’s only then that Martin connects that Jon wasn’t just placing his shaking hands on his bloody shoulders, he was —

_Pushing me away._

At the same moment that Martin makes this connection, Jon _bolts_ out from under him, slipping out from Martin’s grasp like a fish desperately trying to get back into the water, back where it can _breathe_.

Jon throws open the door to their bedroom — they always sleep with it shut, always, always — and Martin can feel the forceful _woosh_ from the other side of the room, and then he hears the front door of the safehouse open and shut, and Martin is still sitting in the bed, shell-shocked, a chill going down his spine and a strange cloudiness in his lungs. 

_No. Not now, please. Please._

But what else is he supposed to do?

The bed is already cold beneath him, and Martin truly does not know what to do. 

His mind starts wandering — had he done something to scare Jon? To make him uncomfortable? Oh, god, God forbid that he had finally realized that sharing a bed with Martin made him uncomfortable and he had been too nervous to tell him, waiting until it had built up in his system enough to _push him away_ in the wake of a nightmare. Surely that’s it, he’s pushing Martin away, he’s finally realizing he doesn’t want Martin around —

Or even worse. Or even worse, Jon had left. Left for good. Maybe he had bolted off down to the village to take a statement and take the edge off, to take the statement of the kind old woman that runs the fruit stand at the farmer’s market that Jon said one vulnerable night was marked deeply by the End, maybe return to London on foot, just, just _leave_ him.

If nothing else, the thought of him going down to the village makes Martin’s stomach roil and twist uncomfortably. He knows it’s rough. He feels wrecked in his soul when he is forced to watch Jon on his bad days, when he can’t even get out of bed, can’t keep even water down, the dark circles around his eyes sordid and striking against his already-dark skin and the fever that takes hold of him makes him miserable. Martin _hates_ it.

But he will never forgive himself if he can’t prevent Jon from preying on those people just three kilometers away.

He stands, ignoring the way his joints creak and the wet spot at his shoulder peels away from his skin when he shifts. Another thing Martin ignores is the way that the cold hardwood floors beneath his bare feet feel suddenly too much like sand and _no_ , he _cannot_ do this right now. He wouldn’t… Jon wouldn’t just _leave_ , he wouldn’t leave, he wouldn’t leave, no matter how much the voice of Peter is echoing in his head and he wants to just retreat under the covers where the spot is already cold. 

Martin does not do these things. Instead, he soldiers forward, through the bedroom door threshold they’d crossed together that first night and collapsed from exhaustion and through the living room where their mugs have already been set out for morning tea and through the front door they walk through when they need to make a grocery run down to the village and his feet utterly stomp over the front porch where they sit outside when the sun is nice and then he nearly walks right over Jon, sitting on the steps, hunched over with his arms wrapped around himself and Martin nearly _faints_ with relief.

He bites back _Christ, Jon_ and his teeth close around _what’s wrong_ and his fingers clench against a _here, let me help_. He doesn’t know what he’s allowed to do right now, and that scares him something awful.

Instead, he simply sits down at the opposite end of the steps as Jon, and listens, and watches. 

He doesn’t turn towards Martin upon his sitting down—in fact, Jon makes no indication that he even knows Martin is there. Which is fine. Really. His breathing is deep and deliberate, his shoulders lifting and falling perhaps excessively. Jon is curled in on himself, and now that Martin can get a better look at him, he can see that his arms are wrapped around his knees, his face buried in the crook of his elbows. He’s still shaking.

Martin tests the taste of the words in his mouth before he says them.

“E-easier to breathe if you open up a bit, love.”

Damn his stutter. He doesn’t want to sound so… _unsure_ of himself. He wants to _help,_ damn it.

Jon doesn’t react, and for a moment, Martin thinks he just didn’t hear him, or worse, he’s just gone ignored. Once that moment passes, however, Jon shifts; slowly at first, but then he removes his shoulders from his ears and lets his arms rest at his sides. 

Even in the dark, Martin can see how gaunt his face is. It makes his heart clench; in the past few days, Jon has been so, so _present_ , and whatever Martin has gone and done has just. Just ruined that. His heart clenches yet again.

Jon takes another purposeful breath, blowing out the cool Scottish air in a billowing exhale. “The, um,” he starts, and Martin refocuses. Jon isn’t looking at him, instead his eyes trained on the sky. It’s cloudless, tonight. “The Coffin.”

Martin narrows his eyes, his mouth hanging open and ready to ask what he means—and then it clicks.

The Coffin. The Buried. The way that Martin was, was _smothering_ him, when he’d woken, and—

Martin breathes. Martin breathes, and Jon breathes, and Martin breathes and he tries to will his breaths not to come out foggy.

“Oh,” comes his intelligent response. The night air presses around them, and while it may feel freeing for Jon, the openness, for Martin, he feels like he’s being choked. He can’t imagine being the reason for one of Jon’s nightmares. He has enough of them, Lord knows. 

“I’m so so—“

“Not your fault,” Jon cuts him off. There’s no hostility in his voice; he’s just stating a fact in that ever-so-Jon way. Martin is about to apologize again when Jon tacks on “love.”

Against his better judgement, Martin laughs, of all things.

The endearment sounds so foreign in Jon’s mouth, and he really doesn’t mean to laugh, honestly. It makes his heart clench in a completely different way. Jon looks at him, then, a glint in his eyes that Martin thinks may be tears but he can’t be sure. Martin knows, at least, that _he_ is a bit teary-eyed.

“What?” Jon objects to his giggle, and Martin only laughs again because he sounds so _offended_. “ _What?_ ”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, love, I—“ Martin can’t finish. He wipes at a tear that’s fallen from his left eye, and as soon as it falls, he berated himself for making this about himself when Jon was the one that just had a nightmare and stormed out of the house. “I’m sorry. I just—I worry about you _so much_ , Jon, and I hate that I did this to you, and I’m so sorry, and you just called me _love_ and you never do that, and it’s just a lot.”

“ _Martin_.”

“I’m sorry.”

And Martin wipes away at another tear, and then Jon is there, because he always is.

He’s knelt down in front of him, taking Martin’s hands in his own and pressing close-lipped kisses to his knuckles like he’s royalty. There’s such _concern_ in his eyes, and no, this is wrong.

“Jon, really,” Martin says, and there’s a conviction in his words that would be more convincing if his voice wasn’t shaking slightly. “I _am_ sorry. I didn’t know that me holding you would… would do that.”

“It doesn’t normally.”

“But still.”

They’ve reached an impasse, it seems. 

Martin starts to lean forward, looking to Jon for approval, and when he finds it, places his head heavy on Jon’s shoulder. He wraps his arms around him, and when Jon relaxes instead of tensing, instead of pushing him away, Martin only squeezes tighter. 

He remembers, once upon a time not that long ago, walking by Jon’s office in the aftermath of his encounter with the Buried, peering subconsciously through the plexiglass window. He’d looked crushed, literally and metaphorically, his hair filthy and knotted, bruises mottling his skin like stained glass at a church. He remembers the way he’d had to quash the zing of relief that went through him then, the relief that his plan had worked, and he had to ignore the way that he wanted to badly to _wash Jon’s hair_ , of all things. No. He had kept walking. He is not walking now, and he is not walking away again.

Jon’s hair smells like old paper, like a library, like an old poetry collection. He smells like _comfort._

“Should we go back inside, love?” Jon says, finally, pulling slightly away from Martin so as to look him in the eye once more. The endearment comes more naturally this time, and it makes Martin beam, which, in turn, makes Jon beam, as well. “Bit chilly out.”

It takes them a while to get back to sleep, the both of them; Martin takes some cajoling to come close again, but Jon manages it, because Martin can’t tell him no. 

It ends with Martin in Jon’s arms, his head on Jon’s chest, listening to his heart beat in time. Martin holds and is held, and Jon holds and is held, and in the morning, they drink tea from the mugs set out the night before.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you enjoyed! consider leaving a comment or a kudos if you did <3
> 
> you can follow me on tumblr @malevon or my tma sideblog @mikecrewe


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